


Til The End of the Line

by orphan_account



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-28
Updated: 2016-10-28
Packaged: 2018-08-27 12:07:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8401108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: When a soldier with a metal clockwork arm makes an attempt on the life of the Director of SILAS, it's up to super soldier Laura Hollis, still grieving over the death of her best friend two years ago, to confront the threat. AKA a (kinda) steampunk Winter Soldier AU.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Emphasis on the Winter Soldier and not so much on the steampunk. I hope you guys like it. 
> 
> TW: death, shooting.

_Hello, it's me._ _I was wondering if after all these years, y_ _ou'd like to meet, to go over everything._ _They say that time's supposed to heal ya, b_ _ut I ain't done much healing._

 

 

When Laura Hollis was eighteen, she had watched her best friend die. Now she was twenty and she still remembered it clearly in her mind, almost as if it had happened yesterday.

_The train was moving along the tracks at a high speed, causing everything in it to sway unsteadily. Laura brought her shield up to knock a Corvae man in the jaw while simultaneously throwing her head back to crush the nose of the ther Corvae man who was gripping her from behind. The man she had knocked in the jaw slumped against the wall on the far side of the train, while the one behind released her._

_She stepped toward Carmilla, who was fighting two men of her own. Just then, the door to the other compartment opened, and three more men decked out in the black outfits with the red crow insignia that were synonymous with the name Corvae stepped into their compartment._

_"Get the super solider. Kill the other one." Their leader's voice was cold._

_Carmilla launched a double high kick and turned her body in midair (she used to be a ballerina before she joined the army, Laura had the time to remember fondly) while striking out with her palm, and managed to kick one of the men she was fighting through the open doors of the train compartment, where his yell implied that he had fallen straight down the thousand feet drop at the right side of the tracks, and seemingly hit the other man in the windpipe, causing him to claw at his throat frantically in an effort to breathe._

_The other three men had probably advanced, but Laura had been so worried about her best friend that she did not notice. It was only when Carmilla looked in her direction, her eyes growing wide, that Laura remembered the three men and turned around, and she caught a flash of metal and glass in the light._

_"Laura, look out!"_

_Then she was getting pushed to the side, the swaying of the train causing her balance to be a bit more off, super soldier or not, and she looked up in time to gaze in horror as one of the Corvae men stabbed the needle meant for her into Carmilla's neck instead._

_For a moment, Carmilla gripped her uniform tighter, and then her hands went slack. One of the Corvae men kicked Carmilla in the stomach, causing her to roll precariously close to the open door of the train, while the other two whipped out batons from their hip holsters, their weapons sizzling with electricity._  
_They advanced on Laura, and she dodged their swipes and stabs, trying desperately to get to Carmilla, who was valiantly holding onto the netting that covered the side of the train, with the lower half of her body having fallen out of the train._

_"KILL HER!!" The Corvae leader roared as she brought his baton down towards Laura's head. She sidestepped in and kicked him in the groin, and when she turned back, the Corvae man closest to Carmilla glanced at her with a glint in his eye. Then he unsheathed his knife and cut the netting with a single stroke._

_The scream of Carmilla's name ripped itself from her throat as her eyes met her best friend's. Carmilla looked exhausted, and before her eyes rolled back in her head, she mouthed something to Laura. Then her hands went slack and she was gone._

None of the Corvae men had survived that day. Laura still had a scar on her chin from when she had tried to lunge towards Carmilla to grab her, only someone had taken a hold of her ankles and set her crashing onto the train floor.

It did not matter, though. None of it did anymore. The Corvae men were dead and so was Carmilla. When she had finished her objective on the train and walked back along the train tracks to find Carmilla's body, it had not been there. It had not been anywhere.

These thoughts and memories occupied Laura's mind as she trudged heavily up the stairs to her apartment on the 3rd floor. She almost did not notice when the door of her next door neighbour opened.

"Oh, hello, Laura!" The high pitched voice was unmistakably familiar.

Laura forced a small smile on her face before she looked up. "Hey, Perry."

"Long day?" Perry asked empathetically, adjusting the laundry basket that she held against her head.

Laura nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She always missed Carmilla, always regretted that she could not save her, but it was always harder on this particular day every year.

"Well, you're always welcome over at my place for cookies. Or I can also make a new batch and bring them over if you'd like," Perry offered, smiling earnestly.

"Thanks, Perry, but I think I'm just gonna go to sleep. I'll talk to you tomorrow, alright?" Laura was grateful to have Perry as her neighbour, she really was, but she felt like she needed to be alone right now. Or at least with someone who would understand how hard today was.

"Sure thing, dear. Get some rest." Perry patted her shoulder lightly, then locked her own door behind her and went down the stairs with her basket.

Laura let herself into her own apartment, then leaned her forehead against the door.

"It's about time," a voice drawled from behind her.

Laura sighed and flipped the switches, turning around to see Matska Belmonde sitting in her favourite armchair. Mattie sat with her back straight and her legs crossed, the very picture of elegance and power in her very fashionable and no doubt very expensive outfit.

"I don't even want to know how you got in here again." Her words were ignored.

"You went to the cemetery again, didn't you?" Coming from Mattie, it sounded more like a statement than a question. The other woman eyed Laura's dirt streaked pants.

"You should've been there too," Laura bit out, looking away from Mattie and glancing at her shield that leaned in the corner instead. The shield that was supposed to represent freedom and strength. The shield that was only given to her because she had been injected with super soldier serum. The shield that had not helped her save Carmilla, super soldier serum or not.

Mattie's eyes narrowed at her tone, and then she seemed to brush it off. "Come, sit, pumpkin. I have news for you." She gestured to the couch sitting perpendicular to the armchair, but Laura ignored her, heading towards the small kitchen instead. She resented being made to feel like a guest in her own home, something Mattie admittedly was very good at doing.

She got two wineglasses out of the cabinet, and a bottle of wine out of the icebox. She put all three items on the low wide table in front of the couch, then popped the cork on the bottle with one hand. (Being a super soldier had its perks.) Pouring an equal amount of wine into both glasses, she passed one to Mattie then raised her own in the air.

"First we drink to Carm," she said, closing her eyes briefly and locking her chest, willing tears not to form in her eyes.

"Gidget..." Mattie said slowly, her voice softer than Laura had ever heard it.

"A toast to Carm," Laura insisted, "the best friend a girl could ever ask for." _If only we had gotten a chance to see whether there was anything more between us than just friendship._

Mattie sighed, then lifted her glass in the air. "To the Little Monster," she proclaimed, "she is dearly missed." Mattie took a sip of her wine and watched rather judgmentally as Laura downed her entire glass in three consecutive gulps.

After she was done, Mattie took Laura's glass away from her and put both glasses down on the table, while Laura tried to surreptitiously wipe away the tear that had managed to escape from her eye.

"Now," Mattie announced, clasping her hands together, "back to why I came here. One of my operatives returned from a reconaissance mission yesterday. We think we've found the new Corvae base of operations."

Laura nodded. She was riding on emotion and itching to get into a fight. It would be even better if it was a fight against the men who had had a part to play in Carmilla's death. "And you want me to take them out?"

"Well, that too," Mattie mused, almost as if it were an afterthought, "but that's not the main point of this conversation. Laura, Carm's---"

There was a _Thwip!_ as the curtains in the living room snapped apart, and Mattie grabbed her chest and let out a hiss of pain.

"Shit, get down!" Laura dived toward Mattie and pulled her down onto the floor, keeping her below window level, then crawled towards her shield as stealthily as she could. She grabbed her shield and her revolver from the drawer of the side table next to it, then crouched directly below the window.

Peering over the rim of her shield, she immediately ducked back down as a bullet ricocheted off the shield. She lifted her revolver and fired off a few shots at the silouhette stand on the fire escape outside her apartment. The silhouette dodged her bullets, then began climbing the fire escape.

The assassin was getting away, but she could not leave Mattie here without medical aid.

"Laura, is everything alright?" Laura recognized the voice coming from outside her door as Perry's, but it sounded different somehow. Clearer, more authoritative and in control. A far cry from the woman with a cleaning insistence and a stress-baking coping mechanism.

"Captain Austria?" Her apartment door flew open under the force of Perry's kick and the redhead herself entered, one hand cupping the bottom of the gun, the other hand with a finger on the trigger. She walked carefully into the apartment, taking slow but sure steps, always making sure to keep her feet some distance apart for optimum balance. _A moving firing stance_ , Laura realized. _Perry's military_.

Laura swung her revolver to aim at Perry. "Who are you? A Corvae spy? How long have you known that I'm Captain Austria?"

Perry turned toward her at the sound of her voice, and upon seeing the revolver pointed at her, placed her own gun on the side table next to the door. She raised her hands up in a gesture of surrender.

"Laura, my name is Lola Perry, and I'm an operative with SILAS. Director Belmonde placed me here to keep an eye on you. She was worried that Corvae would send hitmen after you and she wanted you to have some form of protection. I heard gunshots so I came to check on you."

Perry spoke fast and after finishing her explanation her eyes left Laura and roamed around the living room where they found Mattie lying on the floor.

"Oh my!" Perry exclaimed, eyes scanning Mattie for visible wounds. "What happened?"

In that moment, Laura made a split second decision to trust Perry and her explanation.

"Someone shot her through the window. She needs medical attention but the assassin is getting away," Laura replied urgently.

"I'll take care of her. You go after the assassin." Perry made a shooing motion with her hands before slowly pulling Mattie onto her lap.  
Laura glanced at Mattie one last time, who was muttering incoherently something that sounded like "Carm." Mattie was her only connection to Carmilla left. The only one who understood the pain on this day every year.

"Keep her safe," Laura said grimly. "I'm going after the b-- bad person that shot her."

With that, Laura grabbed her shield and vaulted out her window onto the fire escape. The assassin had almost a minute's headstart was several floors above her.

They were fast, but Laura was a biologically enhanced super soldier. She ran up the stairs, occassionally vaulting over railings as she tried to catch up with the assassin.

She reached the roof, and the assassin stopped running in order to fire off a few shots at her, which she used her shield to block. In the moonlight Laura could make out that the assassin was a woman, maybe slightly taller than her own self, with long, flowing dark hair and a mask covering the lower half of her face.  
But the most peculiar thing about the assassin was her left arm. It was encased almost entirely in silver-colored metal.

The assassin continued running straight towards the edge of the roof. If she jumped off, Laura was going to lose her. So she turned her shield horizontal and flung it at full strength towards the assassin, while yelling "HEY!"

The assassin must have heard, because she turned and, almost casually, raised her metal arm straight towards Laura, and caught the shield with it.  
The shield, which had been flying towards her at an incredible speed with an incredible force. And she just stopped the shield in its tracks and was not even thrown backwards by its inertia. Whoever this assassin was, she (or her metal arm) was freakishly strong.

The assassin's eyes met Laura's, and after a brief second, bent her arm back and hurled the shield back at Laura. Then she jumped off the edge.

Laura caught her shield and ran to the edge, eyes scanning the street below, but there was no sign the assassin. She sighed in frustration, then returned back to her apartment.

\---

  
"What can you tell me about the assassin?" Danny asked as she held her pen to her notebook at the ready.

Through the glass wall, Laura could see Dr. LaFontaine, a scientist by profession, working frantically to save Mattie's life with the help of Perry, who was a nurse by profession when she was apparently not running around being a secret spy.

Laura did not take her eyes off Mattie as she spoke. "She was fast. Strong. Had a metal arm."

She heard a sharp intake of breath to her left and turned around to face Danny. The redhead, who towered over her at six feet two, had gone pale. "Did you hear any ticking?"

"What?"

"Her metal arm," Danny clarified, "did you hear any ticking coming from it?"

"No, I didn't get close enough to her to hear anything," Laura answered, curiosity growing in her. "Danny, what's wrong? Do you know who this person is?"

"They call her the Clockwork Soldier," Danny said. "She appeared on the scene around one and a half years ago. She's a ghost. No one has ever gotten up close to her before. The closest any intelligence agency has ever gotten to her was when MI-6 planted a mike right where she happened to stop. They heard ticking over the transmission. Because she didn't explode, they surmised that it wasn't a bomb and that it probably came from her metal arm. People hypothesize that the inner workings of her arm are something like clockwork. Thus, the name."

"No one has ever gotten close to her? Does she not do close combat?"

"Not any nearer than you got," Danny replied. "She's famous in intelligence circles for her sharpshooting. Took out almost all her targets that way."

"Okay so she has a clockwork arm and she never does close combat, only sharpshooting. Do we know anything else that might help us catch her? Do you think she might be linked to Corvae? Mattie mentioned that a SILAS operative recently returned from a recon mission and discovered their new headquarters," Laura said in a rush, her mind trying to piece together the connections between Mattie, Corvae, the clockwork soldier, and that piece of information Mattie had been trying to impart to her before she had gotten shot.

"I don't know," Danny said tiredly, rubbing her eyes with the hand that was not holding her notebook. "There's a shitstorm going on at SILAS HQ right now."

"What's going on?" Laura asked, mentally putting aside Mattie and the clockwork soldier for now. It was not as if she could do anything about them at the moment, anyway.

"Since Director Belmonde is out of commission, the Board is considering electing a new Chair. Vordenburg, especially, is pushing hard for it."

"Vordenburg?" Laura wrinkled her nose. "You mean that slimy old guy who proposed to Carmilla when we were both eighteen?"

Danny raised an eyebrow. "I didn't know that, but if you're talking about Cornelius Vordenburg, yes, that's the one. He's advocating for a more aggressive stance against Corvae. Says his scientist has developed an algorithm to calculate the probability of anyone subscribing to Corvae's idealogy and proposes that we use that algorithm to target and kill off people before they actually have the chance become Corvae."

"That's crazy!" Laura exclaimed. She was horrified at the thought of it.

"I know," Danny agreed, "and the thing is--" she cut off when she noticed something happening in the other room.

Laura turned around. Dr. LaFontaine had put down their surgical tools and was looking at the clock on the wall in the other room. They start to speak, and Laura hurriedly pressed the button on the control panel to turn on the intercom. After a moment, Dr. LaFontaine's voice floated through the speakers into her and Danny's room, defeat evident.

"--tient: Matska Belmonde. Time of death: September 8, 1901. Twenty three hundred hours."

\---

Laura was walking home alone.

Danny had stayed behind to take care of Mattie's body, and Perry had to accompany Dr. LaFontaine back to their lab to help write the surgical report. So she was alone. First Carmilla, now Mattie. Both times she had been there, and both times she had not been able to do a damn thing. She deserved to be alone.

The streets were empty at this time of night, most people having gone back into their homes to read or sleep or spend time with their family, and the darkness nearly overwhelmed the few streetlights that still worked on her road.

Laura felt rather than heard the rush of wind, and ducked to the side, narrowly missing a bullet that instead embedded itself in the pole of the streetlight next to her. She did a mixture between a run and a crawl as she headed towards a nearby alley, hoping that the darkness would give her cover.

She heard footsteps giving chase some distance behind her, and ducked behind an industrial garbage bin, hiding in the shadow the bin cast. The footsteps stopped at the mouth of the alley, then proceeded slowly: hesitant, cautious. Laura waited until the person was right in front of her, then struck out at the person's face with her right hand while twisting her attacker's right wrist with her left.

The attacker let out a grunt of pain and dropped the gun, and Laura kicked it deeper into the alley before just straight up tackling her attacker, causing them both to crash onto the ground. Her initial advantage of surprise had been used up, and as they wrestled on the ground, the attacker proved to be the stronger as they ended up on top, straddling Laura and keeping her hips and legs pinned to the ground, while their left arm got her neck in a stranglehold.

Their left metal arm. It was the clockwork soldier. And clockwork she was indeed. Laura could hear a faint ticking coming from the arm that was strangling her. The soldier's right arm was used to brace her weight against ground.

She tried to pry the arm off, but it was too strong. The soldier's hair fell down in waves, covering both of their faces, and as Laura's oxygen, she did the only thing she could think of.

She reached up and tore the Clockwork Soldier's mask off.

The sight that met her eyes would have had met gasping in surprise if she had any breath left. She knew those features, even in the dim lighting of the alley. The crazy sharp jawline, the mouth that used to smirk at her all time, the dark brown eyes that used to gaze on her with so much warmth.

"Carm?" She managed to wheeze out despite the stranglehold.

The soldier's grip loosened for a moment, then tightened again as the soldier spoke for the first time in Laura's presence. "Who is Carm?" She rasped.

"Carm, Carm, it's me, it's Laura!" Laura cried frantically with the remaining breath she had left.

A brief flicker of something crossed the soldier's eyes, and then those dark brown eyes that used to gaze on Laura with so much warmth went back to their default mode. Dead.

"I don't know you," the Clockwork Soldier rasped. But just as the edges of Laura's vision began to black out, the pressure on her throat lifted, and she gratefully inhaled air into her lungs. After shaking her head to clear it, she looked up to see that the Clockwork Soldier was no longer above her.

Mattie had been trying to tell her something before she had been shot by the soldier who had just tried to kill her too. Something about Carmilla. _But could it be possible, though? We never did find her body._

Carmilla's gravestone at the Styrian National Cemetery was merely an honorary one, a tribute to a fallen soldier killed in the line of duty while serving her country. Laura got up from the ground as she decided to believe in something that, proven wrong, might just break her again just like Carmilla's death broke her two years ago.

_Carmilla is alive. And she is the Clockwork Soldier._

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fic in a while. Feel free to drop some feedback! 
> 
> Not gonna lie, this fic is a mashup product lowkey inspired by [The Clockwork Girl](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8016751/chapters/18353026) by [geoclaire](http://archiveofourown.org/users/geoclaire/pseuds/geoclaire), featuring Laura as a girl with a clockwork hand, and also [the electric soldier](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3614835), a CA:TWS-inspired S4 AU [lupinely](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lupinely/pseuds/lupinely) wrote for the Korrasami fandom. If you haven't read either of those works yet, go check them out!
> 
> This work is currently unbeta'd. If you're interested in this story and would like to beta it, drop me a message on my recently recreated [Tumblr](http://cactusjuiceinspired.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Everyone else, thank you for reading!


End file.
